


A Grace We Never Had

by Saintduma



Series: Traumatic Neuromae [1]
Category: Frostiron - Fandom, Iron Man (Movies), Loki - Fandom, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alcoholism, BDSM, Bad BDSM Etiquette, Dreams, FrostIron - Freeform, Heavy BDSM, M/M, Torture, Vore, Wet Dream, noncon, terminal disease
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-27
Updated: 2013-05-04
Packaged: 2017-12-09 15:13:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 8,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/775657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saintduma/pseuds/Saintduma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Losing Pepper to cancer sends Tony Stark into a drunken downward spiral that doesn't pause with the appearance of Loki Laufeysson.  As Tony quickly degenerates and takes it out on the captive Asgardian, the question arises: what is Loki waiting for?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. they all start somewhere

Day 34  
JARVIS reported Loki was still conscious, but the A.I. was by then far and away wise enough to know that Tony did not want to hear any dry humor about the amount of wasted drive space that was currently dedicated to simply recording the feed from the containment chamber.

Anthony Stark hadn’t been in a mood to hear dry humor for a long time now.

At that point, Tony was alternating between watching the feed, sitting motionless with his hand over his mouth, completely unblinking, and doing what JARVIS considered to be ‘fidgety things’. Things that were completely unspectacular-- things Tony knew how to do, and were enough of a challenge that it took him time and concentration, but didn’t require any of the brilliant innovation that made Tony who he was. 

That hadn’t been present since Ms. Potts.

Day -9  
“-letely metastasized--”  
“To what deg-”  
“Tony, let him finish talking.”

Pepper looked so tired. It was the end of three days of constant testing, and she had gone from being Pepper-- bright, charming, beautiful Pepper-- to this paper-thin ghost of herself. Tony had begun to pinpoint it at the moment they said ‘pancreatic cancer’. That was only a few hours ago. They’d had to do more scans to figure out the extent. 

Her hand was on his wrist, over the Colantotte band. She had barely squeezed, but the movement was enough to quiet him, the defiant, take-charge Tony Stark. He was quiet at that tiny squeeze, and he listened.

Day -6  
“I don’t want to be a machine, Tony.”  
“It’s not a machine, it’s a cybernetically augmented--”  
“It’s a machine, Tony.” There was that fatigue again. The sound of the cancer having drained her life that had proven, so far, completely and utterly capable of stopping him in place.  
He knelt in front of the chair she was sitting in, hooked up to so many machines that were filling and draining her of fluids that were supposed to help her stay comfortable as she withered away. She lifted a tube-laden arm and wrapped it around his head, pulling him against her stomach, and he wrapped his arms around her tiny waist, trying to be so gentle, so incredibly gentle, as she hugged him with the delicate strength she still had. 

Day -1  
The bring orange paper flowers he’d brought for her were bobbing slightly in the air conditioning, but she hadn’t woken up to see them in almost an entire day. 

Day 27  
Tony wore one suit glove and noise-erasing earplugs into the holding chamber. He walked to the metal worktable and put down a plain cardboard box. He looked at Loki for a long moment. The god was silent, but that smile was still on his face. He didn’t have to talk for Tony to be bothered. He’d talked enough.

Tony opened the box and pulled something out. He held it in the unsuited hand, and was still for a moment before he turned, so that Loki could see it. 

Loki’s smile wilted just a little around the edges. It was a mask. The mouth curved in dramatically, like a gag. 

“This is getting a little extreme, don’t you think?”

JARVIS recorded Loki’s words, though Tony would not listen to them, and could not hear them in that moment. 

Tony reached up with the suit-clad hand and took hold of Loki’s jaw, forcing his mouth open as his other hand came up with the black, smooth mask, sliding the gag over Loki’s tongue and pushing his jaw closed around it. He pushed a button on the side of the flexible metal mask, and it shifted, fitting around the bottom of Loki’s chin and digging in, solidifying. He let go of Loki’s face and watched the god’s head drop a little, adjusting to the weight of the metal mask.

Loki raised his head and looked at Tony with fury in those blazing green eyes, and Tony could see him trying to open his mouth so hard that the mask was digging into his Asgardian flesh, causing a line of red liquid to appear around the edge, pool at the tip of the chin, and drip with a wet sound Tony could not hear onto the concrete floor.

Tony left the cardboard box on the table.


	2. everyone has an illusion, here

Day 11  
“JARVIS what the fuck is she doing in here?”

Natasha Romanoff watched Tony stand with only a modicom of stability in the doorway to the trashed lab in Stark Tower and said nothing. She was sitting quite calmly on the stool next to his drafting table, wearing an ‘off-day’ outfit of jeans and a black turtleneck with a pair of her beloved red-soled heels. Her hair had gotten long in the time since Tony had seen her last: it was pinned up behind her head by a some complicated-looking hairpin. Tony knew it was probably sharp. Everything about Romanoff was pretty, and sharp. 

“It appears as though she reasserted her clearance level from when she was in your employ, sir,” JARVIS replied. “I shall address the protocol breach immediately.”

“Fury send you?” Tony grumbled, swirling an amber liquid in the bottom of an oversized crystal decanter.

“Among others,” Natasha replied. “You haven’t left the tower since the Pepper’s funeral.” 

Tony winced at the name, but didn’t ask her to avoid saying it. He could tell JARVIS to not say it. Natasha wouldn’t oblige such a request. “It’s only been a week.”

“And in that time you’ve consumed at least enough alcohol to kill most adult males your size,” she replied. Tony opened his mouth, to ask how she knew, but this was SHIELD they were talking about. They probably counted the bottles in the trash. Or tested the shards of glass. “If you don’t ease up, we will sober you up, Stark. I don’t care if you drink your way through the rest of your life, but if you compromise your life, SHIELD will intervene.” She paused for a moment. “The Avengers will intervene.”

“So this is my come-to-Jesus?” His words were bitter in his mouth. There was nothing clever at all about him in this moment. 

“No. This is your stay-away-from-Jesus. The come-to-Jesus is still on hold.” Natasha stood and strode towards the door that Tony hadn’t managed to actually leave yet, looking up at Tony with that blank, observant mask that served her so well. “Be thankful it was me. Rogers wanted to come sober you up himself. Don’t think we won’t let him.”

“Boy scouts aren’t my type anyway.” Tony gave a smirk, and ungracefully moved away from her, giving her his back and dropping the decanter onto his worktable. He slid onto the stool and dropped his head onto his arms, all semblance of his cleverness gone again. “I got it, Romanoff,” she heard, muffled and defeated. 

Natasha stood for a moment. The bug she was supposed to plant under his worktable was still in her fingers. Fury had wanted to know everything Tony did until they deemed him back on his feet, but for once, that was a call she wasn’t going to make. 

Tony deserved to mourn how he chose.

 

Day 30  
Tony watched Loki stride back and forth across the holding cell on the monitor without any concern about how the god got out of his bonds. Tony knew he hadn’t. The data from the cell said there was still weight borne on the ceiling shackles, still flesh in the ankle cuffs. He’d seen Loki do projection after projection, trying to lure him in, or perhaps simply to exercise some mystical muscle. 

Every projection still had the gag-mask on. He was vaguely curious as to the choice on Loki’s part. He knew that Loki could choose what he projected with his magic. Berlin had proven it. 

So why was Loki wearing it, staring up at the camera, his illusion free-ranging in every other way?

 

Day 33  
“Sir, I would like to remind you that you have not fed or watered the prisoner since his arrival,” JARVIS intoned. 

“Have his vitals changed?”

“No, sir, but even as a war criminal--”

“I’m not interested in ethics, JARVIS, just tell me if his vitals change.”

“Yes, sir.”

 

Day 17  
“Sir?”

“Mute.”

Tony took another deep draught of bourbon and spun a rachet over the exposed nut, pursing his lips and loosening it just a hair from where he’d tightened it to. 

The device that had opened the portal for the Chitauri had sat untouched in Tony’s lab for three months, but in the past couple of days, he was unable to keep his hands off of it. Well, as long as he had a nice slow rolling drunk going on, because as soon as that was gone, so was the magic that seemed to drive him in these strange little experiments. So far, he hadn’t fired it up. He hadn’t felt like it was right yet. 

Felt. Feelings. He pushed that word away. This was a physical feeling. An imperative under his fingers. 

And then, suddenly, despite the lovely buzz he had going, it was gone. Just-- gone.

“I’m going to bed.” 

“Very good, sir.”

Day 2

The paper flowers weren’t really orange any more. The sun had faded them too much. 

Tony stared at them, slightly crumpled in his hand, and didn’t want to throw them away. They were for Pepper. Pepper would love them when she saw them.

Would have loved them if she’d seen them.


	3. good morning and good luck

Day 19  
Tony wasn’t sure when the last time he had a blackout was, but this one had to have been pretty bad, because his hand still had glass in it, and there was a lot more blood on the floor of his lab than could have come from his hand. 

Oh, and there was the Asgardian war criminal hanging from his wrists in one of the storage rooms.

It was time to go into hardware mode.

Day -23  
Tony had been awake for half an hour, at least. He watched Pepper breathing in the sunlight streaming in through the window, golden as it bathed her red hair and pale skin. Behind her, the skyline of Manhattan, so much of it under construction as the damage from the Chitauri invasion six months ago was repaired, glittered as the light reflected off of windows wet with dew in all the strange patterns that city grime collected condensation. The city was beautiful, even as it was healing, and Tony was glad Pepper had talked him into building Stark Tower in New York. The city was so different from his native L.A., and as much as he liked the space he’d had there, Pepper thrived in New York in a way she had quietly bloomed in the City of Angels. 

She was thinner than she was before. Tony thought she was beautiful anyway, because she was, but she had lost weight and appetite lately, and they had been so busy that neither of them had really paused to notice. He noticed, now. He noticed the way that the softness of her face had lessened, that her fingers, already so slender, were becoming almost too thin. 

It was as she began to stir and sigh, waking gently in a beautiful Manhattan morning, that Tony realized he was worried.

Day 18  
Tony’s grip tightened on his glass of bourbon as he looked across the lab at the portal-creation device he had been tinkering with the night before. Behind it, on the cement wall, there was an opening to a very white room, with a stack of books on a light wood table. That room didn’t exist in Stark Tower. 

Next to the device was Loki Laufeysson, wearing a pair of grey trousers, a dark green shirt, looking like he’d just woken up from a rather refreshing nap. He reached into the device, flipped a switch, and the opening disappeared with a hiss from the machine. He looked up at Tony with a smile, reached into the depths of the device, and with the screech of tearing metal pulled the old arc reactor and a handful of other rather important-looking pieces out of the body of the machine and twisted them in his pale hands. 

They fell to the floor in front of his bare feet with a clang.

“Is that my drink?” Loki asked.

“No, but that’s my toy you just broke, and I’m still a little pissed about the last round we had.” Tony’s tone was acerbic. It was clear, now, where the impulse had come from to do the alterations to the machine. Why they had suddenly evaporated and left him tired. Why Loki hadn’t panicked when the Spear of Destiny hadn’t worked as he intended-- just tossed him out the window and let him go on fighting. The pieces fell into place like perfectly sequenced tetrominoes and Tony Stark realized he was just the long piece that had fit perfectly into the god’s plan. 

Loki was playing a long game. One the Chitauri had simply been convenient to. One that hundreds of deaths had been incidental to.

Tony’s grip tightened more on his glass.

“I don’t see why,” Loki said, loftily. “You came out on top, just as you told me you would. There was no throne for me, no parades, no scenario where I was a victor.” He stepped away from the twisted chunk of metal, and the now useless device Selvig had made for him. 

“And yet you’re more depressed than you’ve ever been,” Loki purred, that smile not leaving his face. “Was victory not enough? Was nearly dying delivering your present to the Chitauri some existentialist wake-up call you haven’t recovered from? Surely your little band of heroes can help you overcome your mid-life crisis.” 

“You sound like you’ve been reading self-help books. Do they have those in Asgard or did Blondie bring them hoping you’d have a self-revelation and miraculously stop being a spoiled brat?”

“I’m wounded,” Loki laughed, holding his hand to his chest and raising his brows in mock-pain. “Especially coming from the penultimate emotionally neglected rich kid. Or has your relationship with the down-to-earth secretary helped you come around? And where is the scintillating Ms. Potts? Shouldn’t she be wrapped in a sheet bestowing you with a good-morning kiss?”

Movement.


	4. contusion- a type of hematoma of tissue in which capillaries and/or venules damaged by trauma allow blo---

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Active warning for severe assault.

Day 19  
“This is an atrocious start to a perfectly reasonable conversation.”

Vaguely, Tony wondered what Loki had thought he was going to come here to talk to him about. As soon as he’d started talking, though, Tony had put down his tools, walked out of the storage room, and gotten the sound-blocking earplugs. He’d worked in silence through most of the day, only peripherally aware that Loki was trying to talk to him. He locked the new metal door on the storage room, now a barren but effective containment chamber with cameras and sensors that would allow JARVIS to monitor Loki’s vitals.

Finished with his project of the day, Tony decided to watch the feed and see what had happened after Loki mentioned Pepper.

Part of him, the part of him that he’d quieted with more bourbon, had been appalled at the sheer barbarism that he had attacked the god with. The glass had shattered almost immediately, wedging itself into his hand and into the side of Loki’s face, but it hadn’t stopped him from picking up a ratchet wrench and slamming it over and over and over into the God of Lies’ head. At first Loki tried to push him off, but the one time Loki did manage to roll Tony off of him, he’d just stood up and picked up the metal stool and begun slamming that into Loki’s back. 

The stool broke, and Tony looked away from the feed when he picked up the broken leg and started hitting the prone god again. He could hear the impact still, thud, thud, thud, and then a series of rhythmic cracks as he used the leg on a less padded part of the god’s body. 

Loki just lay there and let Tony do it. 

Day -20  
“You know, I think we should get married at some point,” Tony said, swirling a glass of Pepper’s favorite white wine of the day, a Washington State Reisling, and taking a little gulp before peeking at her out of the corner of his eye. Without letting on he could see her surprised expression, he continued, his tone casual. “I mean, we’re putting your name on like three-quarters of the restoration projects for Manhattan, we might as well make it official. You were the best CEO Stark Industries ever--”

Pepper seized him by his tie and dragged his mouth against hers, silencing him. 

Day 22  
He hadn’t even told him to stop. 

Tony had watched the feed uncountable times now. All the way through. He’d forced himself to not look away as Loki lay on the floor, glass sticking out of his cheek, letting Tony hit him and hit him and hit him. Tony could see that what he thought was Loki trying to push him off the first time he watched the feed was actually just Loki trying to cover his face a little. Tony’s violence had prevented it, so he’d turned over, pushing Tony off of him, and Tony had picked up the stool. 

Loki hadn’t fought him at all.

That bourbon-addled part of him felt bad for Loki. It felt bad the way it would feel bad for anyone who had been so brutally beaten, but Tony told that part of himself that Loki had killed hundreds and hundreds of people, directly and indirectly, and steeled himself against that pity.

And yet through the alcohol and Tony’s determination to silence it, that part of him reminded him, quietly, firmly, that his own body count was still higher. 

Day 41

JARVIS hadn’t spoken in days. Natasha hadn’t come back. Even his phone had stopped ringing, though he suspected it had finally run out of batteries, sitting in the dark for almost a month solid now. He hadn’t opened the containment chamber since he’d put Loki’s mask on. But JARVIS would have said if something had changed, and when Tony watched the monitors, nothing had changed. 

He stood in front of the heavy iron door now. In the background, he could hear the feed from 22 days ago playing the heavy thud of metal against flesh again. He didn’t remember starting it again. 

The door opened easier than he had hoped. He had hoped the resistance of the sliding door would remind him of what was in his hand, but it didn’t.

Loki’s head hung forward, his black hair curling to either side, but it lifted slowly, those bright green eyes moving over Tony’s face, and then down his body to his hands before snapping back up to his face again. 

Tony’s brain registered that there were no marks on Loki’s face from the glass he had embedded there. Slowly he lifted his hand, remembering that when he’d put the mask on Loki, there had been shards of glass on the ground. The higher he raised his hand, the more Loki tensed, drew back, and when Tony stepped forward, barefoot, his foot registered pain. 

“Sir?”

“Mute.”

The first crack of the iron bar on Loki’s ribs made Tony gasp, a shock of reality running through his body, blossoming down his spine and crackling through his limbs. He stood there panting for a moment, his dark brown eyes fixed on Loki’s green ones, feeling the weight of the bar in his hand for the first time, the pain on the bottom of his foot where a shard of glass was working its way between the tendons of his toes. For a moment the world seemed to be full color again, and then his arm came down again, on that same part of Loki’s ribs, and the world blossomed again, and again, and again and again and again  
and again


	5. mute =/= deaf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> active assault warning

Day 51

JARVIS knows that the Tony Stark that has been lurking on this floor of Stark Tower for the past nine days is biologically the same Tony Stark that created it, but there is no other comparison. 

He drinks, he showers, he signs checks, and he finds something in the lab to beat Loki Laufeyson with. And then all of JARVIS’ sensors go dark. 

And they come up with Tony asleep in his bed, and Loki still chained, and still never fed, and never watered, and never moved. 

At least, that’s what JARVIS’ sensors say. And while JARVIS is programmed to be curious, but even the AI does not want to know what happens.

Day -17  
“Tony, we have three different continents to go to in the next twelve days.”  
Pepper’s exasperated tone is accompanied by a flick of her pencil, tossing a strand of that silken strawberry blonde hair from her face. 

“Monaco can wait, we have a horrible track record with that country anyway, the prince said we should take a few years to come back” Tony replied, taking her other hand in his own and trying to distract her from her phone and the itinerary on it. “I’m just saying, a couple of tests, make sure everything’s on the up and up, then we can globetrot.”

“It’s not Monaco, it’s San Marino, and we have a specific invitation from Antonella Mularoni, Tony we can’t blow off an entire country--”

“It’s a microstate, no one even knows it exists--”

“It’s the oldest constitutional republic in the world, Tony, people know--”

“Look, just this once, it’s not like we’re blowing off all of France or something, Pepper--” he took both her hands now and covered the phone with his palm, forcing her to make eye contact with him. “Pepper, please. I know I’m a pain in your ass. I’ll be good for San Marino and Monaco and the Republic of Seychelles and the Federated States of Micronesia, just go to a doctor.”

Pepper looked at him, exasperated, and sighed, pulling her hands away and raising them with a shrug. “Fine. I’ll cut you a deal. We do San Marino and when we come back, we’ll swap the Ecuador trip to the end of the month, and I’ll go to the doctor.”

Tony smiled at that, and wrapped his arms around her waist, lifting and twirling her in a tight circle. “And when we have the all-clear, and we’re done with Ecuador and Japan...”

“You really think I haven’t already started? I’ve had Luca vetting wedding planners since you brought it up.” 

That smile. Tony Stark would flip burgers for the rest of his life for that smile. Fortunately, Pepper Potts was his already, and he was on top of the world. 

Day 53  
“Goddamnit JARVIS!” 

The bottle of bourbon went flying across the lab and smashed against a cement wall, joining a heap of other things that had been hurled against that wall in the past seven and a half weeks in grief and rage and confusion.

“Sir, I must insist. Grief counseling is not a program I am equipped with, but if you continue to isolate yourself and assault the Asgardian as you have been, I will be forced to contact Director Fury on behalf of your welfare.”

“I didn’t program you to babysit me,” snarled the drunken Tony.

“You programmed me to keep you alive excepting in circumstances that involve the greater good, sir.”

“I’m not dying!”

“Sir, you are unrecognizable. What do you hope to accomplish beating the Asgardian? Why haven’t you contacted SHIELD?”

Tony didn’t answer. He spun on his heel and picked up the nearest available object, a piece of the stool from the night Loki arrived, and opened the door to the containment chamber.

Inside, the smell of blood and sweat and alcohol soaked the air. Tony noticed for the first time that Loki hung from the ceiling with relaxed shoulders, despite the fact that the night before he distinctly remembered breaking a crowbar on the Asgardian’s spine. 

Loki raised his head, his green eyes meeting Tony’s, and Tony stared up at him, furious. 

“Why are you here?” he snarled, the leg of the stool dangling loosely in his fingers. 

Loki’s eyes moved over his face again, and then he hung his head, still masked, still silent. 

“Stop fucking with me.” The metal leg came up and across Loki’s ribs, eliciting a gagged grunt of pain. “I know you’ve been fucking with JARVIS. We’re losing half an hour of footage every fucking night. Stop.” Thud. “Fucking.” Thud. “With.” Thud. “Me.” Thud.

Loki raised his head again, the black metal mask cutting into his chin again as he strained to open his mouth, to speak, those green eyes screaming that Tony could just take it off, just ask, that Tony had the power to let this be easy. Blood pooled at the bottom of his chin and dripped onto an already bloodstained cement floor. 

Tony stood, watched Loki strain, watched the blood hit the floor. He looked up from the dried pool at Loki’s eyes again, his grip tightening on the leg again. 

Loki’s eyes flicked to the box on the table, and back to Tony. 

The box. Tony. The box. His eyes stayed there, waiting. 

Tony was still, his breath heavy; the emotional exertion had a disproportionate effect on his body. And then he turned his head, and part of his body, picking up the cardboard box, pupils still fixed on Loki out of the corner of his eyes. 

He tilted up the box, and glanced inside.

Day 41  
Tony sat on the bloody cement floor, a piece of iron the size of his arm bent and red discarded at Loki’s feet. Tony felt better. Exorcised. He could feel a little bit of color in the world, a little bit of texture, even if was mostly green and red and slippery right now. He felt like the rest of the spectrum could come back, now. As he panted slightly from the exertion of managing to bend a piece of iron on the body of another living being, he began to consider that it had been quite some time since he’d fired up the soldering iron and seen what he could do to one of the old arc reactors. Palladium was far more widely available than the components and process necessary to make the vibranium analog in the arc reactor in his chest. It was worth tinkering with. 

He let his head fall back against the wall and looked up at his bloodied and broken captive. Loki Laufeyson’s right shoulder was distinctly out of place. His left hand was curled around the chain that held him from the ceiling, the muscles tense as he held himself up with that hand. It made sense. The cloth of his green linen shirt was torn on his right shoulder, revealing that most of the structure was gone-- the arm sagged strangely as it dangled from the cuff, the shoulder swollen and lumpy in strange places. His hips probably looked like that, too-- Tony couldn’t see through the loose, long shirt. 

A painful sound came from deep in Loki’s throat and chest, drawing Tony’s eyes up to the Asgardian’s face. 

The color drained from the world then, and Tony exhaled with a hiss. He picked up the bent iron and stood, leaning on the wall for support, his dark eyes angry all over again. 

With a crack the iron connected with Loki’s tear-stained cheek bone, and it clanged to the ground as Tony dropped it again, stalking out of the containment chamber and slamming the door. 

Day 53  
A whisper in the dark.

“I know what that kind of pain is.”


	6. color this flesh

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Active warning for light vore (of a really gross sort, but it's brief)

Day 46  
The human eye has three different kinds of receptors with which to distinguish color. The section of the spectrum of light that humans can see is a tiny sliver of the measurable spectrum, infinitesimal in comparison to a butterfly, or some kinds of sea creatures. It is packed, however, with such subtlety and nuance that humans have thousands of names for the range of colors they can see. Uncountable people make their bread and butter through the manipulation of human emotion and comfort using color as their medium. 

Color had fled Tony’s world. 

There was nothing wrong with his photoreceptors. He could still distinguish red from green from blue. But where he had before looked at his suit and seen hot rod red and brilliant gold, the colors had lost all their descriptors. There was nothing left to respond to the carefully selected palette that he had paid an interior designer a fortune to imbue the spaces he lived in with. 

Except--  
except in that gray box of a room, with its single dark table and the pale-skinned war criminal that hung there. 

In that room, red bloomed across ivory, purple and yellow shifted across red as Loki’s body healed bone-breaking strikes with the languid smoothness of a curious snake. In that cell, the world, and Tony, was alive. 

He looped a handful of exposed-end wires through a hole he had dremeled into the end of a piece of steel, wrapped the makeshift handle in electrical tape, and examined the makeshift flogger.

Color. Tonight he would see red.

Day 76  
Tony stood at the edge of the ocean, shards of ice lapping the frozen sand near his boots. A small rectangle of wood and straw, covered in orange flowers, floated away from him, cutting a sluggish path through the icy sea. A fire burned in a brazier carefully constructed of driftwood, the orange flame spiralling sometimes blue and purple as the sulphides in the ocean-soaked wood burned. It would catch the rest of the float, soon, and sink inevitably to scatter in the sea.

It was supposed to be cathartic-- it was supposed to help his mourning. People had done it for thousands of years, with the bodies of the beloved dead, and even without her white body, the pyre was supposed to  
was supposed to

it didn’t feel cathartic. 

It just felt like another way to lose her.

Day 53  
 _teeth sinking into the swollen flesh of an inner thigh, the pus from an infected wound bathing his tongue, filling his mouth with bitter sick_  
 _he gagged_  
 _and realized he was watching Loki’s teeth sink into his inner thigh_

_Loki bit and swallowed, bit and swallowed, bit and swallowed, bit and swallowed, and each swallow left Tony with less sick on his tongue, the taste slowly disappearing  
color returning_

_the clinical cold receded as Loki swallowed the last of the infected flesh, a cat-rough tongue running over exposed muscle and tendon, soothing away the chill  
a heat began to bloom through his abdomen, down, and up_

_each pass of Loki’s tongue on the raw red muscles increased the speed the heat moved through his body_

Tony woke in a cold sweat and tore the black sheet away from his thighs, only to be confronted with smooth, unbroken skin and an erection unlike any he’d had in months. 

He took a deep breath and sighed it out slowly, forcing his shoulders and spine to relax as he sat all the way up, and ran his hands down the top of his thighs hard, as if testing them for the beginning of the infection from a dream that was rapidly losing shape and specificity in his head.

He stood, and faced the window. The sun was still trying to claw itself over the horizon, and this predawn clarity washed Manhattan in more suffocating gray. Plastic from construction on a building nearby had torn three-quarters loose, and was whipping back and forth, as ragged and torn as the city, and Tony Stark.


	7. the act of [creating peerage]: a complexity

Day 53  
Tony stared down at his lap and the crumpled, sun-faded paper petals that lay in it. 

The cardboard box and the stool leg had both been dropped, forgotten, to his feet, and he had sunk against the wall, where he sat, one elbow on his knee, hand in his hair, the other hand with fingers brushing lightly over the edge of the once-orange tissue paper.

Loki was still, allowing Tony’s brain time to process whatever had exploded through it on seeing the flowers. When Tony covered his face with one hand, clearly struggling, a green and gold flicker erupted around his feet and ankles, hands and wrists, and he slipped easily out of the chains. He walked to Tony’s side, and knelt beside him, lowering his face and sweeping his hair to the side-- exposing the button on the black metal mask that would make it lose the rigidity it had held now for twenty-six days. 

Tony was not surprised when he moved his hand from his eyes to see Loki beside him. As much as he might have tried to addle himself, he had known Loki could leave whenever he wanted. 

He reached up and ran his fingers over the rigid black mask. Loki’s green eyes closed as he did, and, not for the first time, Tony wondered if Loki could feel through it. His fingers wandered over the curvature of his cheekbone over the mask, and found at last the button near his temple. He pressed it, and the mask loosened, the edges softening. He pulled it with care from Loki’s face, watching the god’s mouth appear as the gag slid off of his tongue.

Loki closed his mouth completely for the first time in a month.

Tony watched the muscles of Loki’s face spasm for a moment, clearly sore, and then those green eyes opened again, and found Tony’s face. 

“Tell me why,” Tony croaked.

Day 76  
Loki could feel the tension in Tony’s back as the pyre floated through the ice, even through the layers and layers of clothing cleverly designed to keep Tony warm in these frigid temperatures. He said nothing. This was Tony’s time-- time with Pepper. Loki was here because it was his body that could stand the cold of the water to push the pyre, to send it out into the ocean. 

He was now simply a presence beside the brilliant human, a body so that Tony would know he was not physically alone at the moment-- that if he needed to throw himself somewhere, it could be into the arms of someone, rather than into the ocean that could kill him in just a few desperate moments. He wouldn’t put it past someone in the kind of pain that Tony was in. After all, Loki had thrown himself into the cold embrace of deep space when he had felt such loss. The colors of suicide were many. 

He had not expected this. The subtle connections the spear had woven between himself and Tony Stark were too slight for months for Loki to even be able to feel them in his Asgardian prison cell, particularly compared to the connection he’d had with Dr. Selvig, whose regret had dominated Barton’s brief, but intense, self-examinations. It had taken Pepper’s death, and the excruciating pain that had ricocheted across those spidersilk connections, for Loki to see them.

Loki had always been a patient man, whether his Thor and Odin had seen it or not. He planned things, certainly, but the best plan was always the one that showed itself in opportunity. 

Of course, he could not have known the cause of such pain. Just that it was there, and suddenly muddied enough, dream-like enough, to be manipulated. So he had. And he had come out on top in that gamble, until he’d said the wrong thing-- a talent he was trying to lose, honestly-- and been confronted fully with Tony's pain, so brutal it was shocking even to him. 

Day 54  
It was well after midnight. Tony had been awake for a strange eighteen hours, and he was ready to curl up and pray for nightmares, because at least nightmares meant a sober sleep. 

He was definitely sober right now. 

Loki walked out of Tony’s bathroom, all smooth white skin and black bathrobe. His long black hair, cleaned of blood, hung wet over his shoulder, and he held up a hairbrush that made Tony look away.

"I feel rather strange using your dead fiancée's hairbrush."

"I feel weird seeing it in your hand."

An awkward silence stretched.

"Do you rather I call--"

"Would you just go?"

They spoke at the same time, and Tony felt a black weight form in his stomach as soon as the request left his lips.

Silence once more.  
And then:

"No. No, I will not leave."


	8. voidfill

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Active warnings for dubious consent, definitely NSFW m/m.

Day 53  
“Tell me why.”

Loki had been thinking about the answer to this question for weeks. It had taken him until only a few days ago to find an answer worthy of his tongue, and the genius’ ears. 

“We are graceless creatures, the two of us.” He remained kneeling, but settled back onto his heels, looking down at a piece of that faded orange paper that had fallen onto his blood-browned linen trousers. He turned it between his long, pale fingers, his fingernails cracked and ragged. “We batter our way into the hearts of those around us, and insist on standing alone on arrival. We come only grudgingly into peerage, escape it as soon as the opportunity presents, and yet we feel loneliness the mass of stars in our souls.” 

Tony’s eyes were fixed on his face, and Loki raised his eyes to meet those dark irises. “She made you feel less alone. I commend your restraint; I might have swallowed galaxies to fill such a void.” 

Day 76  
Tony had finally gone quiet in Loki’s arms, the last of the rawest of the mourning scraped from inside of him. The god had been right about the pyre. It had been difficult. It had been painful. But they had watched all through the brief quasi-night, when the sun had barely dipped its toes into the horizon before it began its ascension anew. When the pyre had finally burned itself too fragile to float, and broken into pieces that burned desperately against the encroaching ice, Tony had felt things loosening in his body that he hadn’t realized were tight. And when those pieces had been swallowed by chunks of ice, and sunk below waves laden with shards and shards of frozen sea, those things floated freely in his body, and he had folded himself into the body that presented itself. He cried until he shook, and shook and cried until he could barely stand, and Loki had borne his weight in the silence he needed. 

Day 54  
“I think I have the right--”

“Don’t condescend to tell me your rights,” Loki replied, putting Pepper’s hair brush down and moving to the side of the bed and looking down at Tony with a baring of teeth that bore only passing resemblance to a smile. “Do not labor under the idea that the rules of guests and hosts apply here. You established the rules some time ago.”

“I can have JARVIS contact Fury and we can reestablish a fun new set of rules,” Tony replied, the first glimmer of his old self showing through for almost two solid months. 

Loki’s smile was far and away more relaxed at this. He’d stacked the deck in this regard, and he knew exactly how the cards would hit the table. “Would you give me up so easily?”

“I’ve probably spent on the upwards of fourty solid hours in the past twelve days beating you with every object I had at hand.” Tony switched tactics quickly. “Fury might be an improvement.”

“Perhaps I’m not interested in an improvement.”

Tony stood and moved behind Loki, crossing his left arm over his abdomen and propping the right elbow on his wrist, his right hand over his untended goatee. His brain had slipped out of that frozen gear at last, for some reason, and was quickly gaining horsepower. Loki watched him with a tilted head as Tony circled him, waiting for the genius human to come to a conclusion.

“I want to see,” he said, at last, and gave a decisive nod. “Show me. You can do that, can’t you? Show me what I did to you.”

Loki raised an eyebrow, and considered it. It was well within his abilities. The key was whether obliging benefited him. Stark was... a valuable asset. 

The robe slid off of his shoulders, and he tossed it onto Tony’s bed. He turned his face back to Tony, closed his eyes, and a red mark blossomed across his face, which purpled and dissipated quickly. Another appeared over one shoulder, then the opposite side of his ribcage, both accompanied by cracking sounds and mottling skin.

Marks appeared, moved, and faded like fireworks rippling across his body, but the booms were cracks and the trails of light the yellow remains of bruises. Standing there, Loki’s limbs were dislocated, spine and hips shattered and reconstructed and shattered again, his body twisting and sagging in unnatural ways that reflected the brutality Tony had rained upon him over the course of a week and change. 

It lasted for almost ten solid minutes, a fast-forward replay of abuse, and when it was finished, he stood with his body displaying all of the marks, though not the dislocations. 

From his face to his feet, he was covered in bruises, all of them deep, deep purple, showing how hard he had been hit. They lingered, and began to very slowly fade. 

He opened his eyes.

Tony stood with slightly widened eyes, brows knit, lips parted, breathing a little heavily.

The bruises faded faster as Loki took two quick steps towards Tony and grabbed him by his jaw, jerking the human towards him. “The pain arouses you,” he accused, but the flicker of anger was gone, and he found a smile had begun to move across his face. His grip eased into a caress, his white thumb moving over Tony’s cheek. “Of course.” 

Loki took a fist full of fabric and began to slowly pull the fabric of Tony’s shirt away from his body. It split on the seams as he pulled and he used his grip on Tony’s jaw to turn him toward the bed. Tony’s hands came up to Loki’s wrist and tried to pull it away, but he knew already that would be futile. 

“Sir?” JARVIS intoned. 

Loki’s hand loosened on Tony’s jaw. 

“Mute.” 

Loki smiled. 

The bruises had faded completely from Loki’s body. The god shoved Tony back onto the bed with a light flick of his hand. 

“Where are your implements for this?”

“Bedside table, second drawer.” 

Loki pulled out a bottle of lubricant and returned his attention completely to the human who would prove instrumental to his work, surveying him as Tony composed himself. 

“I’m not a catcher,” he asserted. 

Loki didn’t reply. He took hold of the cuff of Tony’s trousers and began to drag them down. Tony grabbed the empty belt loop to keep them up. He wanted to establish this, first, and yet as Loki’s bright eyes meandered their way up to Tony’s face, he had a sinking feeling he’d made a mistake. That smile spoke of too many mistakes. 

One hand on Tony’s calf, to keep him still, the pale god jerked the trousers, hard, and they tore, leaving red marks on Tony’s hips where they dragged, and Loki jerked them again in the other direction, leaving Tony naked and trying to sit up again, to speak, but Loki denied him that, grabbing his face again and pushing his mouth against Tony’s in a mockery of kissing that left Tony’s mouth tender and most certainly bruised. 

Loki pushed him down, kneeling with one leg on either side of Tony’s thigh, and snapped the lid off of the little bottle of lubricant and to dump its contents onto one hand. Tony took the opportunity to scramble towards the end of the bed, but the unlubricated hand darted out, caught him by the shoulder, and tossed him casually against the headboard. Tony felt the breath forced out of his lungs, and for a brief moment was stunned. Diaphragm temporarily paralyzed, he was struggling to get air, and yet Loki was lifting his hips, sliding two slick fingers inside of him. It hurt. There wasn’t any way around it-- Tony had done fucked up things, but it had been well over a year since he’d done anything that involved stretching those muscles, and Loki was not being particularly attentive. 

Tony had finally begun to be able to draw air into his lungs when Loki parted Tony’s thighs on either side of his hips, and began to slide his lubricated cock slowly into him. It elicited a strained whimper that Tony hated himself instantly for giving, especially when Loki gave a triumphant grin at the sound of it. 

“Stop,” Tony managed to whisper, though there was almost no voice to it. 

“No.” 

Loki dragged his teeth over Tony’s cheek as he continued to press himself into the man, and his hand found Tony’s mouth again, forcing his fingers past his lips and teeth and shoving them over his tongue as he gave one last little shove to find himself fully inserted. 

Tony sucked on those fingers, biting the knuckles, trying to stop Loki from shoving them further down his throat, but they pushed past his uvula to rest just past his gag reflex. Tony gave a choking sound, but he had finally managed to exhale, and flex his diaphragm enough to painfully and slowly draw some breath into his lungs through his nose. 

“You are still aroused,” Loki whispered into Tony’s ear, that smile audible in his voice. His fingertip drew a very light circle around the slit in Tony’s cock, enough to make Tony shiver, and Loki give a light laugh. Tony’s legs tightened around Loki’s hips, and he reached up, though Loki had control of his head at the moment, and tangled his fingers in Loki’s hair, pulling hard enough to elicit a hiss from him. Tony’s other arm wrapped around Loki’s shoulder, pressing their bodies together. 

Loki used that position to press Tony’s body against the headboard, careful to not crush him, but only just. He began to slam his cock up into Tony’s ass, each snap of hips coming just a moment faster than the one before had, drilling him at a pace that the Asgardian found to be quite pleasurable, but knew to be quite punishing to the mortal frame beneath. 

He continued to punish Tony’s body until the human began to gasp too hard, a painful affair with how bruised Tony’s lungs felt. Loki slowed the pace, and his fingers began to roll and thrust in Tony’s mouth, simulating what his hips were doing. He paid attention once more to Tony’s cock, kneading it with his hand as Tony pulled at his hair. The muscles inside Tony’s ass seized at the kneading, as if he were about to come, and Loki dragged his fingers out of Tony’s mouth, wrapping them around his cock to stop him. He continued to move his hips inside him as Tony quietly gasped and moaned against Loki’s shoulder. 

His hand loosened, slowly, as he fucked Tony, and the pressure began to build in them both. Tony didn’t release suddenly when Loki’s hand began to move over his cock again. They crashed together.

And then-- Tony’s lungs swallowed cold air, and Loki’s mouth filled with blood. Tony’s body tightened around him again, spilling all over their abdomens, and Loki’s body reciprocated with the tightening, filling the mortal.

They remained locked, only very slowly relaxing, each feeling in a different way as though they had been hit by something bigger than they’d expected. Loki straightened, slowly, and realized the blood in his mouth was Tony’s. He had bit the human’s shoulder, hard, but Tony hadn’t quite realized it yet. He smiled, and pressed a light kiss to the shoulder. A flicker of green, and it healed to a pale, old scar. A present for Tony to discover later. He would be displeased, which was just fine with him. 

He considered the man, limp now in his hands. The things that had happened in the past weeks had been... marking. For them both. He pulled slowly out of him, and began to use the bathrobe to clean him off, long white fingers using the soft black material to wipe away seed and blood. Loki had used him harshly. It was only fair. 

“JARVIS? Would you be so kind as to turn the lights out?”

Loki left the soiled robe on the floor, and wound his arms around the human as the AI politely obeyed his request. He ran his fingers over the arc reactor in Tony’s chest, and closed his eyes. 

Yes. Tony Stark was going to be a most valuable asset in the years to come.


End file.
